Wordsworth, Paul D.: Moving in the Margins. Desert Travel and Power in Medieval Central Asia. Leiden/Boston: Brill 2024 (= Handbook of Oriental Studies: Handbuch der Orientalistik. Section eight: Uralic and Central Asian Studies 32). € 143,10. ISBN 978-90-04-53487-2.

This book offers a reinterpretation of historical, cultural, and geographical paradigms – such as that of the ‘Silk Road’ – which require reconsideration. It does so through a work dedicated to an ‘archaeology of movement,’ examined within the desert expanse of the Karakum (Turkmenistan) within a chronology from 670 to 1220. The concept of the Seidenstraße is thus deconstructed through an analysis of a dense network of roads and alternative routes that reveal transversal and divergent trajectories, challenging a monothematic and monolithic designation such as the ‘Silk Road’ (even though, in recent years, scholars have begun to refer to the ‘Silk Roads’ in the plural). Across seven chapters, the book explores the issues surrounding an archaeology and anthropology of movement, which engages with historical periods, ethnic groups, cultures, societies, commercial, economic, military, and political dynamics, as well as architectural and artistic aspects, technologies, and practices.